Manufacturers and marketers seek to improve products and product packaging by providing new and improved concepts, functionality, design aesthetics and efficiency. Products and product packaging that enjoy such improvements are far more likely to succeed in the marketplace. The likelihood of such success is determined, in part, on a consumer's impression of product and product package attributes. As used herein, product and product packaging attributes refer, generally, to characteristics, features, qualities and aesthetics of a product or product packaging.
Manufacturers strive to ensure a product's success by gathering information regarding product and product package attributes from various sources, most notably consumers, and using the information to enhance innovation for new product and packaging design and development. The types of information received and analyzed for product and packaging design also include competitors' products and a manufacturer's internal constraints and capabilities.
Several patents regard work processes and methodologies that seek to evaluate consumer needs and assess performance standards, expectations and/or capabilities. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,627,973 to Moore Business Forms, Inc. (the “'973 patent”) discusses a method for optimizing business-to-business selling strategies. The patent discloses numerically assessing a customer's needs, calculating a user's ability to meet those needs, and employing a graphical approach to communicate the findings. The methods taught in the '973 patent are directed to determining the value of a potential customer by assessing an “area of opportunity,” defined as the difference between a potential customer's score and a user's score.
The methods taught in U.S. Pat. No. 6,115,691 to Ulwick focus on identifying desirable strategic outcomes for a consumer and other participants by processing thousands of relevant market facts and criteria. After considering the demands of all the entities that have an impact on new product development decisions, importance ratings are attributed to the value of individual participants and the array of desired outcomes.
In “New Products Management”, Crawford and DiBenedetto discuss “gap analysis” to show how various products in the market are perceived and positioned with regard to key benefits. Information representing a consumer's perceptions are either applied judgmentally, or is captured from consumers and graphically mapped on horizontal and vertical axes that represent two significant product attributes. Voids in the map represent potential opportunities for new products. The Crawford methodology accommodates physical or known factual attributes of products, but does not account for perceptual beliefs that may drive the intent of consumers to purchase.
Prior art methods of improving design solution proposals frequently do not result in products and packaging that are aligned with or further business objectives. This may mean that a product or package is not attractive to consumers, and, therefore, not practical for the manufacturing company. Furthermore, none of the above-identified prior art references go beyond capturing consumer needs, processing the needs in a computer algorithm and revealing alternative product features, revised selling strategies and other decision inputs. For example, the '973 patent does not endeavor to assess a manufacturer's or competitor's existing performance to determine gaps or address the identified needs.